The journey to New Mexico was a study in sensory deprivation. The windows of the military staff car were shaded, reducing the world to a blur of muted light and shadow. Albright sat in the front passenger seat, a silent sentinel, while a stern-faced MP drove. Robert was in the back, a prisoner in a velvet-lined box. They spoke little. There was nothing left to say.
They drove for days, the landscape outside changing in a way Robert could only guess at. The humid flatness of Ohio gave way to a different America—flatter, drier, the sky stretching wider and more imposing. He caught glimpses of small, dusty towns and vast, empty plains through the edge of the window shade. It was a world of sepia tones and immense silence, a stark contrast to the frenetic energy of Wright Field.
He spent the hours in a kind of waking trance, mentally preparing for the role of a lifetime. He had to be the perfect, cooperative genius. Eager, but not too eager. Brilliant, but with just enough human fallibility to remain believable. He had to gain their trust completely before he could even think about betraying it. It was a performance that would require every ounce of his intellect and will, a high-stakes chess match where a single wrong move meant not just exposure, but the possible unraveling of history itself.
On the third day, the car began to climb. The air grew thinner and cooler. They passed through a guarded checkpoint where his papers were scrutinized by unsmiling soldiers, then continued up a winding dirt road into the Jemez Mountains. Finally, the car stopped.
"Welcome to Site Y, Mr. Vale," Albright said, his voice cutting through the long silence.
Robert stepped out into the crisp, pine-scented mountain air. He was standing on a high mesa, surrounded by rugged, beautiful wilderness. But the natural beauty was brutally interrupted by a raw, new settlement of hastily constructed barracks, laboratories, and administration buildings, all surrounded by a formidable fence topped with barbed wire. The air hummed with the distant sound of generators and the faint, percussive rhythm of construction. This was Los Alamos. The secret city. The birthplace of the bomb.
He was processed with impersonal efficiency—more paperwork, a medical examination, the assignment of a small, spartan room in a long, low-slung building. It was even more barren than his quarters at Wright Field. There was a single bed, a desk, a chair, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The window looked out onto another identical building.
He was no longer Robert Vale, the Intuitionist. He was an entry on a manifest, a component in the greatest scientific endeavor in human history.
The following morning, his orientation began. It was conducted by a relentlessly cheerful security officer who outlined the rules: no travel without permission, no discussing your work with anyone outside your assigned group, all mail censored, the perimeter is patrolled, the penalty for espionage is death. The message was clear: you are here until we are done with you.
He was then introduced to his new "colleagues." It was a dizzying experience. He shook hands with men whose names were legends in his time—brilliant, driven physicists, chemists, and mathematicians, all gathered in this remote place to achieve the impossible. They looked at him with open curiosity. He was the mystery man, the "practical engineer" Albright had reportedly poached from the Air Corps, the one with the uncanny knack for solutions.
His first assignment was deliberately vague, another test. He was given a set of theoretical calculations concerning neutron moderation—a critical aspect of achieving a nuclear chain reaction. The math was complex, but to Robert, it was undergraduate-level physics. He knew the answers. He knew the precise graphite purity required, the optimal geometry for a reactor pile.
He spent three days pretending to struggle. He filled notepads with deliberately flawed equations, with dead-end lines of reasoning. He asked carefully constructed "naive" questions in meetings, questions designed to sound insightful but ultimately lead nowhere. He had to be seen to be working diligently, but not producing a breakthrough. It was mentally exhausting, a constant, high-stakes act of intellectual self-sabotage.
At the end of the week, he was summoned to a meeting with the project's scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
Oppenheimer was a gaunt, intense figure, his famous pipe clutched in his long fingers. His eyes, dark and preternaturally intelligent, seemed to see straight through Robert's skull.
"Mr. Vale," Oppenheimer began, his voice a quiet, hypnotic rasp. "We've reviewed your work on the neutron moderation problem. It's... interesting."
Robert's heart froze. Interesting. What did that mean?
"You approach the problem from a unique angle," Oppenheimer continued, pacing slowly. "Your initial calculations are flawed, of course. But the paths you take to arrive at those flaws... they are not the paths of a novice. They are the paths of a man who is deliberately avoiding the correct one."
He stopped and fixed Robert with that piercing gaze. "It is as if you are walking through a maze you have already solved, Mr. Vale, and you are carefully stepping into every cul-de-sac, pretending to be lost."
The air left Robert's lungs. He had been exposed. Not as a time traveler, but as a saboteur. On his very first test.
He was trapped. There were no folksy anecdotes about uncles' trucks here. No clumsy coffee spills. He was in a room with one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, a man who could see the architecture of a thought as clearly as Robert could see the blueprint of a bridge.
The game was over before it had even begun. He had traveled ninety years into the past, navigated a small town, impressed the War Department, and now, in this quiet office at the end of the world, he had met his match. The long road from Oak Creek had led him here, to nowhere.